Trobrianders, Darwin, Ekman and Fear Recognition

Do you know who else has trouble recognizing fear in other people's faces? Psychopaths. Just saying. Nothing against the Trobrianders, who sound like a very interesting people.

Science

"For more than a century, scientists have wondered whether all humans experience the same basic range of emotions—and if they do, whether they express them in the same way. In the 1870s, it was the central question Charles Darwin explored in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. By the 1960s, emeritus psychologist Paul Ekman, then at the University of California (UC) in San Francisco, had come up with an accepted methodology to explore this question. He showed pictures of Westerners with different facial expressions to people living in isolated cultures, including in Papua New Guinea, and then asked them what emotion was being conveyed. Ekman’s early experiments appeared conclusive. From anger to happiness to sadness to surprise, facial expressions seemed to be universally understood around the world, a biologically innate response to emotion.

That conclusion went virtually unchallenged for 50 years, and it still features prominently in many psychology and anthropology textbooks, says James Russell, a psychologist at Boston College and corresponding author of the recent study. But over the last few decades, scientists have begun questioning the methodologies and assumptions of the earlier studies.

Psychologist Carlos Crivelli was one of them. In 2011, he was working with his colleague, psychologist José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Together, they came up with a plan to investigate Ekman’s initial research in Papua New Guinea. Crivelli and longtime friend and research partner, Sergio Jarillo, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, traveled to the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea’s east coast, where about 60,000 indigenous Trobrianders live. These horticulturists and fishermen have been historically isolated from both mainland Papua New Guinea and the outside world. To learn all that they could, Crivelli and Jarillo embedded themselves in the local culture. They were adopted by host families and took clan names; Crivelli became “Kelakasi” and Jarillo, “Tonogwa.” They spent many months learning the local language, Kilivila.

When it came time to begin the study, they didn’t need translators or local guides. They simply showed 72 young people between the ages of 9 and 15 from different villages photos from an established set of faces used in psychological research. The researchers asked half the Trobrianders to link each of the faces to an emotion from a list: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, or hunger. The other half was given a different task.

Crivelli found that they matched smiling with happiness almost every time. Results for the other combinations were mixed, though. For example, the Trobrianders just couldn’t widely agree on which emotion a scowling face corresponded with. Some said this and some said that. It was the same with the nose-scrunching, pouting, and a neutral expression. There was one facial expression, though, that many of them did agree on: a wide-eyed, lips-parted gasping face (similar to above) that Western cultures almost universally associate with fear and submission. The Trobrianders said it looked “angry.”

Surprised, Crivelli showed a different set of Trobrianders the same faces, but he couched his questions in stories—e.g., “Which of these people would like to start a fight?”—to draw out more context. They, too, associated the gasp face with threatening behavior, Crivelli reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The implications here are really big,” he says. “It strongly suggests that at least these facial behaviors are not pancultural, but are instead culturally specific.”"

Conditioning males to become sexually aroused by a penny jar (Plaud & Martini, 1999)

Behavioral scientists, using classical conditioning, can make this penny jar sexually arousing.

Behav Modif. 1999 Feb;23(2):254-68.

The respondent conditioning of male sexual arousal.

Plaud JJ¹, Martini JR.

Author information

• ¹Behavioral Associates of Massachusetts, Halcyon Center, North Attleboro 02760-2459, USA. joseph_plaud@brown.edu

Abstract

The respondent (classical) conditioning of male sexual arousal was investigated, employing penile plethysmography and 2 control procedures. Nine participants participated in three sessions, for three consecutive weeks. Each session consisted of fifteen stimulus periods and fifteen detumescence periods. Three participants participated in each of three different experimental conditioning procedures. Sexually explicit visual stimuli preselected by each participant were utilized as the unconditioned stimuli (US), and a neutral slide of a penny jar was employed as the conditioned stimulus (CS). In the first procedure, short delay conditioning, the CS was presented for 15 seconds, followed immediately by the US for 30 seconds. The second procedure was a backward conditioning procedure. In the third procedure, a random control condition, the presentation of CS and US was determined randomly. Results indicated that participants showed systematic maximum increases in penile tumescence from baseline in the short delay conditioning procedure, but not in the other two control procedures. Implications of these results to behavior therapy strategies which are based upon the conditioning of human sexual arousal are examined and discussed.


 

Neuroenhancers boost chess performance

If you are not already using coffee as a neuroenhancer, perhaps you should consider starting. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams says, "I feel sorry for people who don't drink coffee." Two to four cups a day ought to do the trick. Any more and you build up too much tolerance and get a paradoxical fatigue. 

worldchess.com

"A landmark study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology, the official publication of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, has found that there are two prescription drugs that seem to enhance chess-playing ability.

The drugs are methylphenidate, which is most commonly marketed as Ritalin (by Novartis), and modafinil, which is sold as Alertec, Modavigil and Provigil. The study also measured the effects of caffeine and found, not surprisingly, that it also had an ameliorative impact.

When adjusting for an unexpected side-effect of the drugs on decision-making behavior – paradoxically, that they made the subjects play slower — the study found modafinil improved the players’ performances by an average of 15 percent, methylphenidate by 13 percent, and caffeine by around 9 percent....

...The new study, which was conducted by 13 professors and researchers from several German universities and the University of Stockholm, is titled, “Methylphenidate, modafinil, and caffeine for cognitive enhancement in chess: A double-blind, randomized controlled trial.”

Methylphenidate and modafinil have been around for years – in the case of methylphenidate, since the early 1960s. Both are stimulants. Methylphenidate is commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), while modafinil is often used for narcolepsy and other sleep-related disorders.

Dr. Klaus Lieb, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Mainz in Germany, and one of the study’s main authors, said that the researchers wanted to see whether people who already were performing at a high level mentally could have their performance enhanced through chemicals.

“There are lots of data showing that a subject in a sleep-deficient state or exhausted people do profit from an enhancer,” Dr. Lieb said. “We were really interested to show whether it is possible to show an enhancement effect, or a hyper performance effect in subjects who already perform at the top level of their cognitive performance.”

Dr. Lieb said that the researchers went into the study with the expectation that the stimulants would not show much benefit. “We primarily thought that it is not possible to enhance high cognitive tasks and were astonished to find such results,” he said.

Chess players were chosen as the subjects in part because several of the researchers play. (Harold Ballo, who works with Dr. Lieb, has a FIDE rating of 1981.) In addition, the fact that computers could be used as sparring partners and their strengths calibrated to equal that of the subjects made chess an ideal laboratory.

The study recruited 39 rated players (40 when it began, but one dropped out). Each player was given a series of neuropsychological tests and questionnaires and then asked to play against computers running the chess-playing program Fritz 12. In their games, the players had 15 minutes total for their moves, the computers had six. Before each set of 10 games, the players were given either methylphenidate, modafinil, caffeine, or a placebo. In total, 3,059 games were played over a several-week period.

The results contained one surprise: The amount of time that the players took in their games when they were on the stimulants increased, so much so that more games were lost on time when players were taking the drugs than when they had taken a placebo. That skewed the results. When those losses were factored out, leaving 2,876 games (or data points) the benefits of the drugs became clearer.

The study’s conclusion addressed the additional thinking time as a critical component of the effect of the stimulants. The authors wrote, “This suggests that neuroenhancers do not enhance the quality of thinking and decision-making per time unit but improve the players’ ability or willingness to spend more time on a decision and hence to perform more thorough calculations.”

HARKing and P-hacking

HARKing = Hypothesizing After Results are Known.


"Data dredging (also data fishing, data snooping, and p-hacking [cool interactive tool in linked article]) is the use of data mining to uncover patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, without first devising a specific hypothesis as to the underlying causality." [Wikipedia]


Interesting chapter on bias in Randomized Controlled Trails



Publication bias: "a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it. " [Wikipedia]


Meta-analysis of stereotype threat on girls' math scores showing asymmetry typical of publication bias. From Flore, P. C., & Wicherts, J. M. (2015)

Hey heroin users! Take care not to shoot up in novel locations!

Ozzy and John, like 500,000 other heroin addicts in the US, getting ready for their busy day.

Psychology Today

"K.J. and his wife were heroin addicts. They would shoot up together at home, and they’d been doing it for about four years. When his wife decided it was time to quit, K.J. reluctantly agreed. But the next day he was hanging out with friends, and they bought some heroin together. Because he didn’t want his wife to know, he stopped instead at a public toilet and shot up. He never made it home.

The authorities attributed K.J.’s death to overdose, but Canadian psychologist Shepard Siegel thinks there’s something mysterious about this case (link is external). First, K.J. had taken no more than his usual dose, not enough to kill a seasoned addict whose body had built up significant tolerance. Second, none of K.J.’s friends who’d bought from the same dealer overdosed, so the batch clearly wasn’t tainted or especially potent.

We think of an overdose occurring when a person takes more of a drug than the body can handle. Heroin is an opioid painkiller, but if you take too much, it suppresses the respiratory system. You go to sleep, you stop breathing, and you never wake up.

However, Siegel maintains that K.J. didn’t die because he’d taken too much heroin. Rather, he died because he’d taken the usual amount in an unusual place. Apparently, doing drugs has something in common with investing in real estate—location is key. But why?

First-time drug users tend to start with a small, relatively safe dosage. But as they use the drug over and over again, their body learns to accommodate by adjusting its chemical processes. As tolerance develops, the addict needs a larger dose to get the same effect, and as the body adjusts to the new level, the user boosts the dosage once more. Eventually, the seasoned addict takes as a normal dose an amount that would kill a novice.

Because heroin is such a quick-acting drug, the body needs to prepare itself before the injection takes place. But how does the body know it’s time to ramp up its defenses? It takes its cues from the environment. If you always shoot up at home in the evening with your spouse, then these all become environmental cues that a jolt of heroin is coming, and the body prepares to chemically deal with the drug.

This is why, when K.J. took a similar dose in a familiar environment the day before he died, he was able to handle it. But the next day, when he shot up in an unfamiliar location, his body wasn’t expecting a hit of heroin, and so it wasn’t prepared to process it. The sudden influx of the drug overpowered his system and killed him.

Environmental cues serve as conditioned stimuli signaling to the addict’s body that the drug is coming, and the body prepares itself in response. This works the same way that Pavlov trained dogs to salivate to a bell. Ring a bell, give the dog some food, and it salivates. Repeat this several times, and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell. That is, the bell serves as a cue that food is coming, and the dog’s digestive system responds by preparing for it.

The idea that familiar environmental cues can help protect an addict from overdose may sound far-fetched. But in fact, Siegel argues, there’s considerable evidence to support the hypothesis. For example, several studies have found that the majority of apparent heroin overdoses did not involve lethal levels of the drug in the blood stream."

Siegel, S. (2016). The heroin overdose mystery. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 375-379.

We are never going to understand everything (bounded comphrehension)

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Edge Annual Question, Nicholas G. Carr

"By leaps, steps, and stumbles, science progresses. Its seemingly inexorable advance promotes a sense that everything can be known and will be known. Through observation and experiment, and lots of hard thinking, we will come to explain even the murkiest and most complicated of nature’s secrets: consciousness, dark matter, time, the full story of the universe.

But what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many respected thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that some of nature’s mysteries may forever lie beyond our comprehension.

Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The mysterians argue that the human mind may be incapable of understanding itself, that we will never understand how consciousness works. But if mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”

The simplest and best argument for mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the anatomy of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has observed, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.

Mysterianism, it’s important to emphasize, is not inconsistent with materialism. The mysterians don’t suggest that what’s unknowable must be spiritual. They posit that matter itself has complexities that lie beyond our ken. Like every other animal on earth, we humans are just not smart enough to understand all of nature’s laws and workings.

What’s truly disconcerting about mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns. “As to myself,” remarked Isaac Newton in his old age, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” It may be that we are all like that child on the strand, playing with the odd pebble or shell—and fated to remain so.

Mysterianism teaches us humility. Through science, we have come to understand much about nature, but much more may remain outside the scope of our perception and comprehension. If the mysterians are right, science’s ultimate achievement may be to reveal to us its own limits."

There's no replication crisis in behavioral genetics!

Plomin et al. say, "Deal with it."

"The most important reason for the reproducibility of

behavioral genetic results is that genetic effect sizes are

large. Heritability estimates for behavioral traits, typically

between 30% and 50%, are by far the largest effect sizes

in psychological science. What other findings in psychological

science account for 5% of the variance, let alone

50%? Consider sex differences as one of countless examples.

Although thousands of articles have reported significant

sex differences in psychological traits, a general

rule is that sex differences account for less than 1% of the variance (Hyde, 2014)."

Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics

Finding 1. All psychological traits

show significant and substantial

genetic influence

Finding 2. No traits are 100%

heritable

Finding 3. Heritability is caused by

many genes of small effect

Finding 4. Phenotypic correlations

between psychological traits show

significant and substantial genetic

mediation

Finding 5. The heritability of

intelligence increases throughout

development

Finding 6. Age-to-age stability is

mainly due to genetics

Finding 7. Most measures of the

“environment” show significant

genetic influence

Finding 8. Most associations between

environmental measures and

psychological traits are significantly

mediated genetically

Finding 9. Most environmental effects

are not shared by children growing up

in the same family
Finding 10. Abnormal is normal

Facial Feedback Effect Replication Study

Guess which person thought the cartoons were funnier? The article describes a major replication project on the facial feedback effect, which found no effect (8 labs found no effect and 9 found an effect). Says the co-author of the original study: “Given these eight nonreplications, I’m not changing my mind. I have no reason to change my mind.” I wonder...

Slate

"Back in Illinois, Strack and Martin tried the same experiment as Laird but with pens in place of fake electrodes. They handed felt-tip markers to 92 undergrads and taught them how to hold them in their mouths. The experiment, they said, was meant to test the students’ “psychomotoric coordination” and how people with physical disabilities might learn to write or use the telephone. After the undergrads had done some practice tasks—using the pens for connect the dots and to underline the vowels on a page of random-printed letters—they were presented with a set of four single-panel comics from The Far Side and asked to rate their funniness.

The results matched up with those from Laird’s experiment. The students who were frowning, with their pens balanced on their lips, rated the cartoons at 4.3 on average. The ones who were smiling, with their pens between their teeth, rated them at 5.1. What’s more, not a single subject in the study noticed that her face had been manipulated. If her frown or smile changed her judgment of the cartoons, she’d been totally unaware.

“It was theoretically trivial,” says Strack, but his procedure was both clever and revealing, and it seemed to show, once and for all, that facial feedback worked directly on the brain, without the intervention of the conscious mind. Soon he was fielding calls from journalists asking if the pen-in-mouth routine might be used to cure depression. He laughed them off. There are better, stronger interventions, he told them, if you want to make a person happy.

Over the next two decades, many other labs adapted and extended his idea. One group stuck a pair of golf tees to its subjects’ eyebrows and had them touch the tips together, so as to force their brows to furrow. (This seemed to make the subjects sad.) Another taught people five different ways to hold a pencil in their mouths, so they could distinguish between the effects of, say, a polite, fake-looking smile and those of a more natural, eye-crinkling one. (The more authentic smiles seemed to make the subjects happier.)

Strack and Martin’s method would eventually appear in a bewildering array of contexts—and be pushed into the realm of the practical. If facial expressions could influence a person’s mental state, could smiling make them better off, or even cure society’s ills? It seemed so. In 2006, researchers at the University of Chicago showed that you could make people less racist by inducing them to smile—with a pen between their teeth—while they looked at pictures of black faces. In 2013, a Spanish team found that wearing a pen-in-mouth smile could make a person more creative in a picture-drawing task. And Strack himself would demonstrate that by getting students from his university to furrow their brows, he could bias them to think that celebrities weren’t really all that famous.

Indeed, the basic finding of Strack’s research—that a facial expression can change your feelings even if you don’t know that you’re making it—has now been reproduced, at least conceptually, many, many times. (Martin likes to replicate it with the students in his intro to psychology class.) In recent years, it has even formed the basis for the treatment of mental illness. An idea that Strack himself had scoffed at in the 1980s now is taken very seriously: Several recent, randomized clinical trials found that injecting patients’ faces with Botox to make their “frown lines” go away also helped them to recover from depression. According to proponents of the facial-feedback theory, these studies show that merely losing the ability to pout can force improvement to a person’s mood.

Looking back across these years of follow-up research, including the success of facial feedback in the clinic, Strack found himself with little doubt about the field. “The direct influence of facial expression on judgment has been demonstrated many, many times,” he told me. “I’m completely convinced.”

Psychologist Richard Nisbett's "crusade" against correlational studies

If Dr. Nisbett is listened to, we can be free from studies that purport to show that breastfeeding increases IQ. There's an important third variable that is usually neglected. Breastfed babies are smarter because their mothers (and fathers) are smarter, and IQ is highly heritable, especially among the upper middle class (where breastfeeding is most likely to be found).

Edge.org

"The thing I’m most interested in right now has become a kind of crusade against correlational statistical analysis—in particular, what’s called multiple regression analysis. Say you want to find out whether taking Vitamin E is associated with lower prostate cancer risk. You look at the correlational evidence and indeed it turns out that men who take Vitamin E have lower risk for prostate cancer. Then someone says, "Well, let’s see if we do the actual experiment, what happens." And what happens when you do the experiment is that Vitamin E contributes to the likelihood of prostate cancer. How could there be differences? These happen a lot. The correlational—the observational—evidence tells you one thing, the experimental evidence tells you something completely different. 

In the case of health data, the big problem is something that’s come to be called the healthy user bias, because the guy who’s taking Vitamin E is also doing everything else right. A doctor or an article has told him to take Vitamin E, so he does that, but he’s also the guy who’s watching his weight and his cholesterol, gets plenty of exercise, drinks alcohol in moderation, doesn’t smoke, has a high level of education, and a high income. All of these things are likely to make you live longer, to make you less subject to morbidity and mortality risks of all kinds. You pull one thing out of that correlate and it’s going to look like Vitamin E is terrific because it’s dragging all these other good things along with it.

This is not, by any means, limited to health issues. A while back, I read a government report in The New York Times on the safety of automobiles. The measure that they used was the deaths per million drivers of each of these autos. It turns out that, for example, there are enormously more deaths per million drivers who drive Ford F150 pickups than for people who drive Volvo station wagons. Most people’s reaction, and certainly my initial reaction to it was, "Well, it sort of figures—everybody knows that Volvos are safe."

Let’s describe two people and you tell me who you think is more likely to be driving the Volvo and who is more likely to be driving the pickup: a suburban matron in the New York area and a twenty-five-year-old cowboy in Oklahoma. It’s obvious that people are not assigned their cars. We don’t say, "Billy, you’ll be driving a powder blue Volvo station wagon." Because of this self-selection problem, you simply can’t interpret data like that. You know virtually nothing about the relative safety of cars based on that study.

I saw in The New York Times recently an article by a respected writer reporting that people who have elaborate weddings tend to have marriages that last longer. How would that be? Maybe it’s just all the darned expense and bother—you don’t want to get divorced. It’s a cognitive dissonance thing.

Let’s think about who makes elaborate plans for expensive weddings: people who are better off financially, which is by itself a good prognosis for marriage; people who are more educated, also a better prognosis; people who are richer; people who are older—the later you get married, the more likelihood that the marriage will last, and so on.

The truth is you’ve learned nothing. It’s like saying men who are a somebody III or IV have longer-lasting marriages. Is it because of the suffix there? No, it’s because those people are the types who have a good prognosis for a lengthy marriage.

A huge range of science projects are done with multiple regression analysis. The results are often somewhere between meaningless and quite damaging.

I find that my fellow social psychologists, the very smartest ones, will do these silly multiple regression studies, showing, for example, that the more basketball team members touch each other the better the record of wins.

I hope that in the future, if I’m successful in communicating with people about this, there’ll be a kind of upfront warning in New York Times articles: These data are based on multiple regression analysis. This would be a sign that you probably shouldn’t read the article because you’re quite likely to get non-information or misinformation.

Knowing that the technique is terribly flawed and asking yourself—which you shouldn’t have to do because you ought to be told by the journalist what generated these data—if the study is subject to self-selection effects or confounded variable effects, and if it is, you should probably ignore them. What I most want to do is blow the whistle on this and stop scientists from doing this kind of thing. As I say, many of the very best social psychologists don’t understand this point."

Scientifically valid findings should replicate, p < .005

Real Clear Science

"Typically, biomedical scientists use a significance level of 0.05 to test new hypotheses or to announce discoveries. In plain English, this means that scientists are willing to accept a 5% probability that the data they collected occurred merely by chance. The scientific community has agreed that the arbitrary "5% chance of being wrong" standard is sufficient for most research.

Not so, says Dr. Valen Johnson of Texas A&M University. He believes the 0.05 significance level needs to be replaced. Using the Bayes factor -- a ratio that measures the probability of competing hypotheses -- Dr. Johnson shows that the 0.05 standard is terribly insufficient. (See figure.)

According to his analysis, a significance level (denoted with the Greek letter "alpha" on the X-axis) of 0.05 corresponds to a Bayes factor of around 3 to 5. That's rather pathetic, as it means the newer, more fascinating hypothesis is only 3 to 5 times more likely to explain the data than the old, boring one.

Significance levels more stringent than 0.05 yield much more convincing Bayes factors. For 0.01, the Bayes factor range is 12 to 20; for 0.005, the range is 25 to 50; and for 0.001, the range is 100 to 200. A Bayes factor of 100 or greater is considered "decisive" evidence in favor of the new hypothesis.

Dr. Johnson advises the scientific community to replace its 0.05 significance level with 0.005. If his statistical analysis is correct, it's difficult to argue with him."

Source: Johnson VE. "Revised standards for statistical evidence." PNAS. Published online before print, 11-Nov-2013.

"What's healthy for one person may not be healthy for someone else."

I'm fairly certain that dark chocolate and black coffee are good for me. Your results may vary. How about this New Year's Resolution? Ignore all news reports about nutrition research in 2016.

Real Clear Science

"The problems with nutrition science begin with how most of its research is conducted. The vast majority of nutrition studies are observational in nature [i.e., correlational, not experimental] -- scientists look at people who eat certain foods and examine how their health compares with the health of people who don't eat those foods or eat them at different frequencies. But as I reported earlier this year, these sorts of studies have a high chance of being wrong. Very wrong.

In 2011, statisticians S. Stanley Young and Alan Karr teamed up to analyze twelve randomized clinical trials that scrutinized the results of 52 observational studies. Most of the observational studies showed various vitamin supplements to produce positive health outcomes. However, the superior clinical trials disagreed.

"They all confirmed no claims in the direction of the observational claims," Young and Karr revealed in Significance Magazine. "We repeat that figure: 0 out of 52. To put it another way, 100% of the observational claims failed to replicate. In fact, five claims (9.6%) are statistically significant in the clinical trials in the opposite direction to the observational claim."

Observational studies are common in nutrition research because they are relatively cheap and easy to pull off. But you get what you pay for. These studies are often shoddy, primarily because they cannot effectively control for confounding variables. Most also suffer from another key drawback, one that may render them totally meaningless: self-reported data. Subjects report their food consumption by remembering what and how much they ate. Memory is not a recording; it is a reconstruction, making it prone to error. In fact, a 2013 study found that the majority of respondents in the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey(NHANES), a survey program that provides data for a plethora of epidemiological studies, reported eating fewer calories than the bare minimum they would need to survive! Something is seriously flawed here.

Unfortunately, when nutrition scientists employ the gold standard of scientific research -- randomized, controlled trials -- the quality of evidence isn't always much better. As health researcher Aaron Carroll wrote for the New York Times:

A 2011 systematic review of studies looking at the effects of artificial sweeteners on clinical outcomes identified 53 randomized controlled trials... only 13 of them lasted for more than a week and involved at least 10 participants. Ten of those 13 trials had a Jadad score — which is a scale from 0 (minimum) to 5 (maximum) to rate the quality of randomized control trials — of 1. This means they were of rather low quality... The longest trial was 10 weeks in length.

...

The ultimate point of nutrition research is to apprise the public of what they should and should not eat. What really is healthy? What isn't? But this endeavor may have been doomed from the start. As was recently showcased in research published to the journal Cell, what's healthy for one person may not be healthy for someone else. Tina Hesman Saey summarized the study over at ScienceNews:

"The researchers made the discovery after fitting 800 people with blood glucose monitors for a week. The people ate standard breakfasts supplied by the researchers. Although the volunteers all ate the same food, their blood glucose levels after eating those foods varied dramatically. Traits and behaviors such as body mass index, sleep, exercise, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and the kinds of microbes living in people’s intestines are associated with blood glucose responses to food, the researchers conclude."

Between poorly conducted research, pervasive corporate influence, and the simple fact that everybody reacts to specific foods differently, nutrition science as a whole must be taken with a gigantic grain of salt."

New Pavlov Biography Rescues Him From Behaviorism

TLS

"In the West, [Ivan Pavlov] has often been taken to have adopted an extremely mechanistic stimulus–response model of mental processing. He himself played his part in constructing this image, not least through the anthropomorphism of much of his research on dogs. But, as [recent biographer Daniel P.] Todes notes, the biggest contribution to this misapprehension was made by his first translators, who erroneously rendered his key experimental concept as “conditioned” rather than “conditional” reflex. In combination with the stereotype of dogs salivating to bells, this has made Pavlov come across as a narrow determinist and as a scientist preoccupied with external phenomena rather than underlying causes. In America, he has been domesticated as a variety of behaviourist. But this is a very misleading view.

One part of the stereotype is correct: Pavlov and his co-workers spent a great deal of their time getting dogs to salivate (though their preferred stimuli were the buzzer and the metronome, not the bell). But, as Todes shows in an exposition both lucid and nuanced, that was merely the starting point. Dogs for Pavlov were experimental subjects rather than machines for replicating results. He and his colleagues developed close working relationships with their animals (even as they tortured them). Control groups were unthinkable: all the dogs were individuals. This allowed Pavlov to conduct elaborate sequences of experiments on the same dog, with multiple combinations of stimuli, but quickly forced him to confront an inconvenient fact: dogs, like human beings, were different. Excitation and inhibition were not universal mechanisms, but varied in their intensity and interrelations from one animal to the next. By 1924, Pavlov enjoyed excellent lab conditions, including the purpose-built “Towers of Silence” where dogs could be isolated from extraneous stimuli, but even this apparently most neutral of environments affected dogs in profoundly different ways. A psychiatrist, perhaps, would have welcomed this evidence of irreducible psychic variation, but a physiologist and determinist, such as Pavlov always remained, badly needed to find a way of accounting for it. The second half of Pavlov’s life may be regarded as one long search for a way of embracing the complexity without abandoning core mechanistic positions.

... 

The underlying irony was that, from approximately the mid-point of his life, this world-renowned physiologist was in fact going after the psyche. Even if he still thought nervous impulses the best way of explaining the mind’s functioning, he was starting to push against the limits of his earlier explanatory models. In earlier days, he had taken “conditional reflexes” as a synonym for what the psychologists called “associations”. He attempted to prove the point by establishing in dogs longer chains of reflexes: not just light-equals-meat, but also metronome-equals-light-equals-meat. But these experiments did not yield satisfactory results: Pavlov had to admit that associations were broader than reflexes, and that the cumulative study of individual reflexes could not account for the “systematicity” of the nervous system. 

In the last decade of his life, as he came to acknowledge that the psychic whole was more than the sum of its nervous parts, his work took a distinctly psychiatric turn. No doubt this was partly the result of intellectual one-upmanship: he wanted to use his physiological toolkit to show the established specialists in the human mind the limits of their own aetiological speculations. But Pavlov’s interest in psychiatric abnormalities was also born of the sheer opportunism of any good researcher. Quite simply, a number of his dogs were nervous wrecks. In 1924, at least a couple of the animals were traumatized by their narrow escape from drowning during the Leningrad flood. Others were broken by the programme of experiments to which they were subjected – vivisection, isolation, electric shocks, jarring sounds. Earlier in his career, Pavlov might have discarded such animals as no longer “normal” and fit for purpose. Now they had become his most intriguing subjects: he analysed mental illness as a “break” caused by intolerable burdens on the nervous system. He was also more explicitly extrapolating from animals to humans. In the mid-1930s, he held court at “Clinical Wednesdays”, where he examined two or three patients [human or canine?] and then delivered a diagnosis, with psychiatrists in silent and sceptical attendance.

Pavlov’s dogs also drew him into the nature-versus-nurture debate. It was plausible to suppose that variation in dogs’ nervous types could be explained by heredity and by their different life experiences before entering the clutches of his lab assistants. In the early 1920s, Pavlov endorsed research on mice that seemed to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics, only later to have to retreat from this position when the experimental results were shown to be flimsy. A few years later, with the creation, thanks to Bolshevik largesse, of a bucolic experimental station outside Leningrad, he had the opportunity to investigate heredity in a more controlled and convincing manner. Dogs could be reared in controlled environments as “free” or “imprisoned”, and multiple generations could be studied to investigate inherited characteristics."

Smiling more at the weigh-in predicts losing your UFC bout





Guess who's going to win?



BPS Digest

"The day before mixed martial artists compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), they pose with each other in a staged face-off. A new study has analysed photographs taken at dozens of these pre-fight encounters and found that competitors who smile are more likely to lose the match the next day (pdf via author website).

Michael Kraus and Teh-Way David Chen recruited four coders (blind to the aims of the study) to assess the presence of smiles, and smile intensity, in photographs taken of 152 fighters in 76 face-offs. Fighter smiles were mostly "non-Duchenne", with little or no crinkling around the eyes. Data on the fights was then obtained from official UFC statistics. The researchers wanted to test the idea that in this context, smiles are an involuntary signal of submission and lack of aggression, just as teeth baring is in the animal kingdom.

Consistent with the researchers' predictions, fighters who smiled more intensely prior to a fight were more likely to lose, to be knocked down in the clash, to be hit more times, and to be wrestled to the ground by their opponent (statistically speaking, the effect sizes here were small to medium). On the other hand, fighters with neutral facial expressions pre-match were more likely to excel and dominate in the fight the next day, including being more likely to win by knock-out or submission.

These associations between facial expression and fighting performance held even after controlling for betting behaviour by fans, which suggests a fighter's smile reveals information about their lack of aggression beyond what is known by experts. [Yes, but the underdogs tended to be the bigger smilers -- betting on the favorites is a better strategy than betting against the smilers.] Moreover, the psychological meaning of a pre-match smile appeared to be specific to that fight - no associations were found between pre-match smiles and performance in later, unrelated fights. Incidentally, smaller fighters smiled more often, consistent with the study's main thesis, but smiling was still linked with poorer fight performance after factoring out the role of size (in other words, smiling was more than just an indicator of physical inferiority).

 ...

Of course, the researchers are only speculating about what's going on inside the minds of the fighters pre-match. It's even possible that some of them smile in an attempt to convey insouciance. If so, Kraus and Chen said "it is clear that this nonverbal behaviour had the opposite of the desired effect - fighters were more hostile and aggressive during the match toward their more intensely smiling opponents." 

_________________________________

Kraus, M., and Chen, T. (2013). A Winning Smile? Smile Intensity, Physical Dominance, and Fighter Performance. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0030745

False Memory among Hammer Attack Witnesses

A police officer shot David Baril on May 13, 2015 at Eighth Avenue and 37th Street as Mr. Baril began swinging a hammer at another officer. Witnesses recalled seeing things that did not happen.

NYT

"The real world of our memory is made of bits of true facts, surrounded by holes that we Spackle over with guesses and beliefs and crowd-sourced rumors. On the dot of 10 on Wednesday morning, Anthony O’Grady, 26, stood in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. He heard a ruckus, some shouts, then saw a police officer chase a man into the street and shoot him down in the middle of the avenue.

Moments later, Mr. O’Grady spoke to a reporter for The New York Times and said the wounded man was in flight when he was shot. “He looked like he was trying to get away from the officers,” Mr. O’Grady said.

Another person on Eighth Avenue then, Sunny Khalsa, 41, had been riding her bicycle when she saw police officers and the man. Shaken by the encounter, she contacted the Times newsroom with a shocking detail.

“I saw a man who was handcuffed being shot,” Ms. Khalsa said. “And I am sorry, maybe I am crazy, but that is what I saw.”

At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, the Police Department released a surveillance videotape that showed that both Mr. O’Grady and Ms. Khalsa were wrong.                   

Contrary to what Mr. O’Grady said, the man who was shot had not been trying to get away from the officers; he was actually chasing an officer from the sidewalk onto Eighth Avenue, swinging a hammer at her head. Behind both was the officer’s partner, who shot the man, David Baril.

And Ms. Khalsa did not see Mr. Baril being shot while in handcuffs; he is, as the video and still photographs show, freely swinging the hammer, then lying on the ground with his arms at his side. He was handcuffed a few moments later, well after he had been shot.

There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.

“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”

...

A leading researcher in the field of witness memory, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, said there was ample evidence that people found ways to plug holes in their recollections.

“If someone has gaps in their narrative, they can fill it in with lots of things,” she said. “Often they fill it with their own expectations, and certainly what they may hear from others.”

These are not the knowingly untrue or devious statements of people who are deliberately lying. False memories can be as persuasive as genuine ones, Dr. Loftus said: “When someone expresses it with detail and confidence and emotion, people are going to believe it.”

Said Dr. Strange, “It is surprising to the average person how quickly memories can be distorted.”

That was certainly Ms. Khalsa’s response.

“I feel totally embarrassed,” she said on Thursday, after having seen the video.

She now believes that she saw the initial encounter and then looked away, as she was on her bicycle. In that moment, the man began the attack, which lasted about three seconds until he was shot. “I didn’t see the civilian run or swing a hammer,” she said. “In my mind I assumed he was just standing there passively, and now is on the ground in handcuffs.”

“With all of the accounts in the news of police officers in shootings, I assumed that police were taking advantage of someone who was easily discriminated against,” she added. “Based on what I saw, I assumed the worst. Even though I had looked away.”

Her own certainty was gone, Ms. Khalsa said.

“It makes me think about everything in life,” she said."

Now Can We PLEASE Stop Pretending that Sports "Build Character"?

"I'm just saying, if you're worried about the ball boy ratting you out about those deflated footballs...there's a way to make sure that doesn't happen."

 



 

The empiricist in me keeps asking two questions, pretty much all the time but especially when confronted with statements such as "Sports build character." The first question is: WHAT DO YOU MEAN? As in, "What do you mean by 'character'? How are you defining it? Because you have to define it before you can measure it. You are measuring it, aren't you? Because you said that sports 'build' character. Which suggests that individuals who play sports end up with a greater amount of character than they had before they started playing sports. So, what is this character you speak of? Is it Courage? Determination? Kindness? Generosity of Spirit? Honesty? Loyalty? (To whom? Or what?). And you can't just mean that 'people who play sports have more character (whatever that is) than people who don't play sports' because, even if that was what you found, you could not attribute the greater character to the sports playing; it could be that people of greater character are more likely to choose sports playing over not playing sports. (This is the same problem we have when confronted with the assertion that "violin playing makes kids smarter"; it's true that kids who play violin get better grades than most kids who don't, but that might be simply because smarter kids choose to play the violin -- there's not necessarily any magical brain development occurring during violin practice that contributes to general intelligence.) But this gets us to the second question: HOW DO YOU KNOW? You would have to randomly assign some individuals to play sports for a certain amount of time and assign some not to play sports for the same amount of time, measuring their 'character' at Time 1 (at the beginning of the experiment) and Time 2 (at the end of the experiment).

 

Let's say you choose to define 'character' as not having 3 or more criminal convictions by age 25. Or graduating high school. Or not impregnating anyone you are not married to. Or working full-time. Whatever it is, let it be something you can actually measure (i.e., count). Now let's take a randomly selected sample of 1,000 14 year olds. Let's randomly assign half of these research participants to a high school where participation in sports is required every season (e.g., football, basketball, baseball). The other half goes to a high school where students are required to take four years of Latin, music (e.g., piano, theory, choir), and art (e.g., drawing, painting, drama, public speaking). The sports players can't take Latin, music, or art, and the Latin/music/art students can't play sports. The experiment begins when the participants are 14 and ends when they are 25 (remember, we have to count their criminal convictions).

 

Which school -- Meathead Manor or Artsy-Fartsy Academy -- is going to have graduates with more character, as defined as "fewer criminal convictions per male student"? (Sorry, but crime is overwhelmingly a guy thing -- you'll have to come up with some other way to measure character among the female students.) That, as we say, is an empirical question. We don't know the answer in advance and we can't know the answer in advance. The difference between an empiricist and everybody else is that everybody else thinks that they already know and therefore facts need not be consulted. The empiricist knows that "facts are stubborn things."*

 

 

 

Here are some facts about sports and character:

 

"Athletes, especially on team sports, tend to score lower on character tests

(Krause & Priest, 1993; Beller & Stoll, 1995; Dunn & Dunn, 1999). George Sage (personal communication, May, 2004) believes that sport in America has reached a "crisis" point and that most athletes' sports experiences are detrimental to their character development. The majority of the research reports that there is a negative relationship between participation in sports and character development (Krause & Priest, 1993; Dunn & Dunn, 1999; Silva, 1983; Beller & Stoll, 1995; Bredemeier & Shields, 1984a, 1984b; Bredemeier, 1995; Hahm, 1989).

 

Summary of Research on Character in Sport

 

A longitudinal study by Krause and Priest (1993), from 1989-1993 at the U.S. Military Academy found significant differences between individual and team sport athletes in moral reasoning and moral behavior. Their longitudinal study of the USMA Class of 1993 showed a decrease in ethical value choices over a four-year period. The results showed that on their entrance to USMA, as well as just before graduation, intercollegiate team athletes scored lower on the Hahm-Beller Values Choice Inventory (HBVCI) than other athletes, including intercollegiate individual-sport and intramural-sport participants."

 

[From Doty, 2006; Journal of College and Character]

 

 

 

 

*"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

 

-- John Adams, 1770, defending the British soldiers accused of perpetrating the "Boston Massacre."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 







Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Thirsty

I'm pretty sure that you're supposed to hydrate with just plain water -- about 7 ounces per hour of driving, according to the results of this experiment. The good news is that's not enough to make you pull over for a rest stop every 30 minutes.

UK Telegraph

"In the study, published in the journal Physiology and Behavior, the researchers carried out a range of tests over two days on male drivers using a laboratory-based driving simulator.

Each volunteer visited the laboratory on three separate occasions and used the simulator on one day while normally hydrated and on a dry day.

The simulated driving task included a two hour continuous monotonous drive on a dual carriageway, with bends, a hard shoulder and simulated auditory ‘rumble strips’, and slow moving vehicles which had to be overtaken.

On one day, the men were provided with 200ml of fluid every hour, and on the dehydration test day, only 25 ml an hour.

Drivers errors, including lane drifting, late braking, and touching or crossing the rumble strip or lane line, were calculated for each condition and compared.

Results show that there was a big increase in driving errors.

During the normal hydration test there were 47 driving incidents, but when the men were dehydrated, the number rose to 101.

The error rate also increased during the two hour period, peaking in the last quarter.

"The results of this initial exploratory study suggest that mild dehydration resulted in a significant increase in minor driving errors during a prolonged, monotonous drive, compared to that seen while performing the same task in a hydrated condition," according to the researchers."

 

Paul Ekman's Lie Detection program is a bunch of baloney

The Chronicle of Higher Education

"On the public-policy front, Ekman’s work helped inspire an immense federal program in American airports called SPOT, for Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques. Costing about $200-million annually—$900-million in all since 2007—the program, run by the Transportation Security Administration, deploys more than 3,000 officers to look for behavioral cues in the faces and body language of airline passengers. Those deemed suspicious are pulled aside and, if they display more signs of duplicity during an interview, are referred to law enforcement.

But Ekman’s lie-detection work has recently taken some hard blows. He has long had academic critics (unmentioned in Blink) who say he has not proved that his behavior-based lie-detection techniques actually work. In November 2013, the Government Accountability Office took things up a notch by recommending that Congress cut the funding of the TSA program. The watchdog agency argued that neither scholarship in general nor specific analyses of SPOT offered any proof that malign intent could be divined by looking at body language or facial cues.

Plenty of academics share this negative view of SPOT. "I really don’t think the current program at TSA is doing anything to protect us," says Charles R. Honts, a professor of psychology at Boise State University, who has consulted with the Department of Defense on behavioral observation.

This is the rare social-science debate in which lives are at stake. If the GAO is to be believed, a 10-year government investment has been a waste, and possibly a dangerous one, if it provided a false sense of security. Is the science behind the SPOT program so misbegotten that it should be abandoned? Or might it be a promising program with a few flaws? Ekman argues that the GAO failed to consider the most up-to-date and pertinent research on the subject, and that pulling behavioral-detection officers out of airports would amount to "open season for terrorists." But his critics say the world’s most famous lie detector has been stretching the truth a bit himself, offering an exaggerated account of his findings to a credulous press and policy makers."

This would have certainly fit Carl Sagan's definition of "A Celebration of Ignorance."

The U.S. government spends millions on a "spot the terrorist by examining body language" program that doesn't work. Before that, it spent millions on a "combat-harden our soldiers' minds" program that doesn't work. Why is any of this a surprise? For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government has been spending billions a year on a free pre-school for poor children program that doesn't work. Should we blame psychologists such as Paul Ekman and Martin Seligman for lining up at the money-filled troughs?

Aside from incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children and going to the moon and then stopping ingloriously, what has the federal government ever done that worked?

Oh wait, I forgot about Teddy: